HUNGRY BUDAPEST.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 885, 11 December 1916, Page 6

HUNGRY BUDAPEST.

'—■ — ft FAMINE THREATENS NATION. CROWDS WAIT HOURS FOR RATIONS. PROSPECT OF WINTER WITHOUT | FUEL. The Hungarian government, frightened by the spectre of famine, is seeking to appoint a food dictator, but can find nobody to undertake the job and dictate with regard to food which has no existence, writes a | Swiss correspondent in an American journal. He describes how the commonest sight in Budapest is that of little crowds, mainly women, who wait wearily outside the shops for food which they cannot get. j Mr Tabody, in the "'Presti Naplo," j describes the torture of these unfortunate women in an interesting article, I telling how he saw among the waitI ing crowds in front of a butcher's shop a captain of police in civilian clothes. "I went up to speak to him," says Mr Tabody, "and found that the dreaded judge of the food I price raisers, who has sentenced some thousands of them to imprisonment, has to stand among the rest land await his turn. He, being an expert on the food miseries of this I unfortunate country, told me that the women have to stand one or two ihours to get a few potatoes; from two to three hours if they want a bit of sausage, from three to four hours for a quarter of a pound of ; sugar and from four to five hours for j a bit of lard or fat. His servant girl was knitting her stockings before a | greengrocer's shop while he waited ! for a bit of lard. A woman who j | wants to get something to eat for her children every day must spend j at least five or six hours waiting in j I the queues." ! The Budapest authorities have just j issued two tickets, one for the gen-: jeral victualling, a general kind of) | ticket without which single tickets : i for bread, meat, maize, potatoes, etc., j | are useless. These general victual-: j ling tickets can be procured only by j | the permanent residents in Budapest j I and the Transylvanian refugees, j 1 which means that travellers and visitors must take their food with them |or go hungry. The second ticket, | issued to the holders of the general ! tickets, is a bean ticket, which entitles every inhabitant to buy a half a pound of beans a month. This j means the eighteenth ticket the in-1 habitants of Budapest now have to! procure, and it is reckoned that in order to get the goods referred to ! in any of the eighteen tickets in- j volves the loss of half a day's work. ' Prices Still Soaring People in Budapest are tired of grumbling about the prices of neces-! saries. Within the last month they j have again risen from fifty to one j hundred per cent., but even the j prices would not matter so much if only the food could be obtained. Budapest is like a town besieged, and the people will soon have to follow the example of the Parisians in 1870 and eat rats and mice. The principal trouble is that the Prussians are taking away nearly everything, and what they leave is seized by the Austrians. There is scarcely any soap in Hun-j gary and the Prussians and Austrians are as badly off in this respect as the Hungarians are. A small quantity,! however, is imported from Holland! and from the northern neutrals. The "Pesti Naplo" learns that the! distribution of the imported soap! among the three allies is being made in this proportion:—Germany gets 70j per cent., Austria 27i per cent., andj Hungary the rest—that is 2i per cent.! It is almost the same as regards Hungarian produce, for the Prussians take the best part of it and leave thei Hungarians to starve. The general! depression on account of the distressing state of affairs is very great, and! the newspapers devote more than l half their entire space to what they call their food miseries. Soldiers on Half Rations. If one takes all these things into , account, with the fact that the mili-i tary are being fed on half rations J 1 and that winter will inevitably bring! with it a famine such as no imagination can picture, it is possible toi; forecast an early end of the war. I Winter is the most dreaded word inj Hungary to-day, especially as there is', no fuel and no hope of an improve-! inent in this respect, for the railways!' are overburdened with the work of', military transport, and cannot sup-1 i ply civilians with fuel. In a month's „ time things will look still gloomier. In Austria the conditions are said r to be even worse, for there the peo-! ; pie have not only no vegetables but|, in many places they are sometimes! | without bread for weeks, and the hj working classes, especially in 80-!, hernia, are in a dangerous state of ex-j, asperation. Ten thousand munition j workers, although under military', control, struck work in Bohemia at I, the beginning of October, and would j, not work until two wagon loads of , flour were distributed among them. Twenty of the leaders were arrested, | and have not been seen since. | The newspaper correspondents in j ] Switzerland send parcels of food and j soap and such things every week, j and are spending the time in sup-U plying the staffs of their newspapers!, with commodities instead of tele-ji graphing news. Hope in Rumania. u In such circumstances it is no ; cause for surprise that great things!? are expected of the concentration! a against Rumania and that the chief: 1 hope which animates the authorities c is that the campaign against that 1 country will end in its invasion and t the seizure of the great quantities of ( foodstuffs which it possesses. There ji are some military critics who attri- 1 bute the Prussian campaig.. on the i

home, has no place in the English lexicon. It is "petrol," just as lieutenant, although spelled lieutenant, is pronounced "leflenant." Several of the voung "wing" subalterns were waiting for the "hickeyboos" to come over the other Transylvanian front to this end, and argue that unless Germany and the monarchy can procure foodstuffs; lYoin somewhere within the next; Iwo or three months (and this somewhere can only be Rumania) the game is up before the winter is over. The "cannot starve us out" boast has become sullidently transparent and prominent politicians agree that first of all the starving out of the army will follow. , Statisticians contend that the first Iwo years of the war indicate that She producing power of the Central Empires is far short of their needs, n spile of the assistance derived irom neutrals during that period. As ;he war goes on the food difficulties will increase and sooner or later inernal troubles will be too intense to dlow of the continuation of an cxcrnal struggle. The stock of cattle, is compared with pre-war times, is said to have decreased 70 per cent., .vhile the producing power of the and is said to show 40 per cent. deTease owing to the shortage of abour and materials. By organisaion, by resort to the ticket system, Germany has been able to go on, but; 10 organisation will help in Austria-j lungary, it is declared, where there j s nothing to organise.